June 24, 2009

Someone Please Explain

I rarely criticize other agency's work. It's too easy to be a creative genius/cheap shot artist when you don't have to deal with the problems or the clients.

But I have to say, Wendy's recent campaign has me completely baffled.

"It's waaaay better than fast food.(R) It's Wendy's."

Here's why I'm confused:

Everyone in the world, except apparently Wendy's, knows that it is fast food.

The 30% of the population who eat almost all the fast food, really like it.

So the question is:

Why would you say it's not fast food when everyone knows it is?

And why would you insult your customer base by denigrating something they like?

They can't possibly believe they can build their business by targeting non-fast food users, can they? No one's that crazy. So what's going on?

It seems to me there's only one explanation for a strategy this cockeyed. It has the smell of the tortured logic of account planning all over it.

I can just hear the presentation.

"We spent 3 months living with consumers, bathing with them, and helping them spank their children. Our unique insight is that even though they visit fast food restaurants twelve times a day, their body language tells us they have tremendous feelings of guilt and self-hatred...they want the reality of fast food, but not the idea of fast food...we can differentiate the Wendy's brand by disassociating Wendy's from fast food..."

Of course, I'm just making this baloney up. But I wonder how far off it is?

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Ad Contrarian Says:

"Shakespeare was a storyteller. You're a copywriter.""Good ads appeal to us as consumers. Great ads appeal to us as humans."

"Social Media: Tens of millions of disagreeable people looking to make trouble."

"As an ad medium, the web is a much better yellow pages and a much worse television."

"Sometimes success in the advertising business requires sitting quietly and letting clients proceed with their hysterical delusions."

"Marketers prefer precise answers that are wrong to imprecise answers that are right."

"Brand studies last for months, cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, and generally have less impact on business than cleaning the drapes."

"The idea that the same consumer who was frantically clicking her TV remote to escape from advertising was going to merrily click her mouse to interact with it is going to go down as one of the great advertising delusions of all time."

"Nobody really knows what "creativity" is. Every year thousands of people take a pilgrimage to find out. This involves flying to Cannes, snorting cocaine, and having sex with smokers."

"Marketers habitually overestimate the attraction of new things and underestimate the power of traditional consumer behavior."

"We don’t get them to try our product by convincing them to love our brand. We get them to love our brand by convincing them to try our product."

"In American business, there is nothing stupider than the previous generation of management."

"If the message is right, who cares what screen people see it on? If the message is wrong, what difference does it make?"

"The only form of product information on the planet less trustworthy than advertising is the shrill ravings of web maniacs."

"There's no bigger sucker than a gullible marketer convinced he's missing a trend."

"All ad campaigns are branding campaigns. Whether you intend it to be a branding campaign is irrelevant. It will create an impression of your brand regardless of your intent."

"Nobody ever got famous predicting that things would stay pretty much the same."